The Poppy and the Rose

I did not like this book at all. 

This is a dual time period story about an American teen attending a summer journalism program at Oxford (though this is barely referenced and comes to nothing) who meets a bunch of extremely stereotypical British people including her scholarship benefactor. The benefactor claims to have some information about the teen's dead father but dies herself before she can reveal it. This leads to the teen somehow becoming trapped in the benefactor's house reading a very shallow and annoying girl's memoir of surviving the sinking of the Titanic, which is full of more ethnic stereotypes, stupid psychic powers and moustache-twirling revolutionaries.

The resolution of the Titanic story is frankly unbelievable and the resolution to the story in the present isn't much better. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.

I DNFed this book, for a few reasons. One of which is that I didn't realize it had a first-person POV and I'm very picky when it comes to these books. If I can, I avoid them. Which doesn't mean I think it can't be done well, but this book just wasn't one of them. The writing style didn't click with me, it was way too flowery and descriptive, which didn't make sense considering we were reading someone's inner thoughts. The main character was also very insufferable and annoying. I was very disappointed because the premise of the book was very interesting. It had potential, but it was wasted on the first-person POV. It would have been much better with maybe a close third-person POV. I read about 50 pages, but it felt more like a chore than entertainment.